To celebrate MZ's birthday this year, he organised a round of axe throwing at Maniax. Never shy at trying new recreational experiences, I was totally up for giving it a go.
Tucked away in St Peter's industrial estate, Maniax is step up like a rustic warehouse: a bit grunge with its graffiti mural and wire fencing, a bit hipster with its wooden targets and trims.
The rules are pretty simple:
Everyone starts off in the same pool and you face off against another player. The loser drops down into a "loser pool" and have to battle it out against each other to get into the grand final with the winner of the original pool.
You have to lose twice to be kicked out of the league.
You throw the axe at the target, over your head. You can do either one handed or two.
In one round you get three throws. The player with the most points from the three throws proceeds into the next round.
Similar to darts, you get points based on where you land your axe on the target.
The axe blade must stick onto the board.
Getting it in the red bull's eye gets your five points, the black gets you three points and the blue gets you one.
There are also two red dots above the target called the “clutch” which is worth seven points. If you want to go for the clutch and earn those points, you can to call out "Clutch!" and signal your intent before your throw. You won't get those points if you hit it by accident.
I got knocked out of the first pool on my first go. Throwing an axe is not something that you normally do, so it did take a little while to get used to the technique. But then I won my first round in the loser pool, and then another, and before I knew it, I was beating all opponents I was up against. I fought my way up the ladder until I found my place in the grand final.
By this point, my opponent was undefeated. I may have been the underdog, but I had to play a lot more games to get that far. All that extra practice gave me time to perfect my technique and my muscle memory was on point. I was basically nailing bull's eye after bull's eye and to everyone's surprise, I came out victorious. Take that, boys!
We were the only ones at the venue and got through our games quite quickly. So since we still had time to spare in our two hour session, we were allowed to go for another tournament with the long axes. They were different to throw once again and required you to put more bend in your throws.
If you're looking to try something different, I would definitely recommend giving axe throwing a try. It was actually really fun! Who knows, you may have an dormant axe throwing talent that's just waiting to be discovered.
Courtesy of MZ
